Photo: CGD
Dr. Alice Evans is a distinguished scholar and expert in the fields of gender studies, development, and human geography. She is widely recognized for her extensive research and publications that delve into critical issues surrounding gender equality, social change, and regional variation. Dr. Evans has published extensively on various topics, including support for gender equality, the changing roles of women as breadwinners, the catalyzing effect of cities on social change, and the dynamics of inequality in Latin America. Her work reflects a deep commitment to advancing our understanding of gender dynamics and their impact on society. Currently, she holds a position as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Her career has included roles as a Senior Lecturer and Lecturer in the Social Science of Development at King's College London, as well as being an Associate Faculty member at Harvard University. She has also served as a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale University and as a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge.
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Khoshimov: Hello everyone. This is “Khoshimov's Economics” or “Hoshimov Iqtisodiyoti”. Today we have a guest, Dr. Alice Evans. Welcome Dr. Evans.
Evans: Thank you.
Khoshimov: Let me start with your bio that you put on your LinkedIn. There, you write “The great gender divergence marks our world. In South Asia and Middle East, most women remain secluded. Chinese women work but are locked out of politics. Latin America has radically transformed nearly achieving gender parity in political representation and massive rallies against male violence. Scandinavia still comes closest to the feminist utopia, but for most of history, Europe was far more patriarchal than matrilineal South Asia and Southern Africa.” And I know I heard about it that you're writing a book on this. So can you start telling us how you discovered this topic and what you do here at Munk School and generally in your academic career?
Evans: Okay, thank you so much. So for the past 14 years, I've been studying gender. I started off doing ethnographic work in Zambia. I speak Bamba. I was living with different communities and studying gender relations over the past hundred years. Then I did comparative work on rural and urban areas, and I traveled to Cambodia studying gender. And then in 2019, I started reading economic history and all these phenomenal books about how the West became rich and democratic. And so people are asking why are some countries rich and democratic while others are poor or authoritarian? And I realized we could ask precisely the same globally comparative question about gender. Why are some countries very, very gender equal? While some like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan remain much more patriarchal? Why is that? And I thought that was a big exciting question that we ought to be able to answer now. Until now, no one's ever tried to answer that question. We don't even have studies of gender explaining histories in one country. And so I thought, okay, this is a crazy task, but let me do it. So what I'm trying to do is study the history of every single country in the world over the past 4,000 years and try to explain what drives change over time, how the entire world has become more gender equal, and why some are more gender equal than others. That is the plan.
Khoshimov: Yeah. But I know you did your PhD in economic geography analysis. So how does your geographical education shape the questions that you ask?
Evans: To be honest, I don't really consider myself a geographer. I think I'm a social scientist. Like I learned from economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, neuroscience. Why not harness all the tools in books, if we're trying to explain humanity? We need everything we've got. So no, my pronouns are social scientists.
Khoshimov: I see. But what about your academic appointments? When you are working on a project, do you work on specific project? When you come here to Toronto, is there any specific thing you're studying or being in Toronto?
Evans: I'm very lucky that I have total freedom to do whatever I think is important. So I meander around.
Khoshimov: That's really cool. So let me introduce you then a bit formally. As I understand, you did your PhD in economic geography, and now you are a senior lecturer at King's College in Development Studies, and then you teach development economics and gender issues.
Evans: I just teach the political economy of development all about 20th century growth or lack of growth.
Khoshimov: Okay. So, the first question from your answer was you were inspired by the studies about how the West became rich. And you start asking questions why there is a gender disparity across nations, how richness is correlated with that?
Evans: Yes, for sure. Definitely. Job-creating economic growth is a major engine of gender equality. Across the world, there is cultural variation in the extent to which communities value female seclusion or value housewives. In some societies like Saudi Arabia, there is a very strong preference. In Thailand, Cambodia, there is a weak preference. But all societies, when there is a job-creating economic growth, women flock into the labor force. But at different rates, and I explain this in terms of the honor income trade-off. So even in conservative communities that value male honor, and where male honor is contingent on female chastity, if job creating economic growth is high enough, if the female earnings are high enough, then it will compensate for men's loss of honor. So we observed this definitely in East Asia during the 1970s and more lately in China in the 1990s. So families cared about honor, a family would worsen their marriage prospects if people were gossiping about the girl thinking she was up to no good. But there were so many factories, there was such rampant demand for labor that all the girls were going to the cities. And so it became normal culturally expected for women to go to work. That income overcame the loss of honor.
Khoshimov: So how necessary is to introduce honor in this equation? I was thinking about household production function, and then you have to have somebody doing household chores. And 80 years ago, for example, somebody had to boil the kettle and bring water from the well and so on. So, it requires quite a bit of labor to maintain the normal activities of the household. And the outside options, working in a factory or whatever, were not that lucrative. So it made sense economically to the rational agents without any sort of non-rational things like honor and stuff that we introduced to this model. It would still make sense. Why do you think introducing things like that…
Evans: Absolutely, but even controlling for economic development. There are some countries where female labor force participation is far lower than what you'd expect.
Khoshimov: Like East Asia right now?
Evans: No. So in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, female labor force participation is very low compared to other countries with the exact same wealth. Let me give you an example, Turkey versus Mexico. Turkey has a stronger preference for female seclusion compared to Mexico. In Mexico, female labor force supply will rise far more rapidly. So, the two countries have the exact same GDP per capita, but they differ culturally with a stronger preference for female seclusion.
Khoshimov: I see.
Evans: You're totally right that if you have a huge volume of domestic work, if you do not have labor saving appliances like ovens, washing machines, microwaves, if you do not have contraceptives… Before the modern era, the adult woman would've spent 60% of her time either pregnant or nursing, she could not leave. But there are many societies that have rapidly reduced their fertility, have access to labor saving appliances, but still women remain in their homes. India now has near replacement fertility, but…
Khoshimov: Less than two. Lower replacement, actually.
Evans: But female labor force participation is only 20%.
Khoshimov: Don’t you think it is because the opportunity cost of staying at home is not that high?
Evans: So, part of it is the massive joblessness, part of it. Absolutely right. It is just earnings for a pittance. But in Southeast Asia, in Mexico, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, we see a very different cultural response to the exact same economic opportunities.
Khoshimov: Okay. How do you think about this strain of literature in economics? I think Nathan Nunn and his co-authors wrote about types of agriculture that people did thousands of years ago¹, and how gender disparities maintain or show themselves today. What's your take on this strain of the literature there?
Evans: Let me say a couple of points. Ester Boserup is the first economist that came up with the idea of the plow². So, for the plow, you need a strong man. You're in the rock, right?
Khoshimov: Upper body strength.
Evans: Yes, upper body and men typically have 2.5 times the upper body strength of women. So, it made sense that men would be in the plow. And she theorized that women would then be at home processing cereals, like ground maize, millet, et cetera. And that would naturalize domesticity, and it would also encourage female subordination. That's the theory. And then Alison, Nunn, et cetera. They test this empirically and they show there's this correlation.
Khoshimov: Oh, okay. They're first to empirically…?
Evans: The first to do it is Ester Boserup, the first theorist is Ester Boserup. Then they test it empirically. The problem with this theory is that even if women are in the domestic arena, that doesn't necessarily imply a cult of seclusion. And it's the cult of seclusion that mediates women's responsiveness to economic opportunities. For example, in the Inuit culture, men would go off hunting, men were in the public domain. They would hunt otters, seals, whales, women would stay at home looking after their children and making the skin. So, they would chew the caribou skins chips. So women were in the igloos. That is domesticity, but they never had a cult of seclusion. Women could be musicians, women could be dancing. When you had job opportunities in the 1970s, 1980s, women see them. So just because you have this idea of women doing that housework, it doesn't necessarily mean that the community will idealize chastity and seclusion, the honor code.
Khoshimov: I think there's one paper, it's still working paper, and I'm blanking on author's name. But her main finding was that the attitude towards promiscuity in mostly African societies is correlated with how much men spend time at home. And if men do jobs that are…
Evans: Oh, maybe you mean Anke Becker's paper²? So Anke Becker has a paper of pastoralism. And this is a great topic for you and I to discuss. So pastoral communities, for example, like Sardinia or maybe Somalia, the man goes away with his herd by himself. And then there is what you might call an information asymmetry to be an economist. And he's like, “What is my wife up to?” So that insecurity might motivate fibrillation, circumcision, et cetera. Okay, let me say there are three problems with this one. Like Nathan…
Khoshimov: Sorry, let me interrupt you for a second. I have heard this story anecdotally from people who are very not familiar with economics literature on gender promiscuity from random chats with Afghan drivers. And they were talking about Afghanistan and their attitudes towards women in different regions. A non-Pashto person was talking about Pashto people being that. And I don't want to use the word theorizing, but his explanation was that, and I was like, “Oh my God, there's actual literature on this”, but I didn't like to interrupt.
Evans: Let's consider one thing that we need to be careful of. A lot of economic historians, they like to look at the Murdock, the ethnographic atlas. The problem with this is data from maybe the 1800s, 1900s, that omits massive cultural evolution over millennia. So you can have a rise and fall in patriarchy. And if you just look at that cross-sectional data, you might think that it's geography that determines things. But it's not. Culture has changed massively over time in the exact same geography. Egyptian women in ancient Egypt, they were not veiled. They were musicians, they were priestesses, et cetera. So there's a lot of cultural variation, which is why I personally want to study change over time. That's one point. Second point is that actually pastoral nomads vary a lot. If we take the Kazakhs, for example, this is not an information asymmetry one, because it's not the one man moving by himself. It's the entire tribe, family moving together. And you also have variations. But that again, that itself is not determinist because Arab nomads would also move the whole tribe moving together.
Khoshimov: But the attitude towards gender is very different.
Evans: Totally different. I would go back to the Innuits. I gave the example before, they were hunters. When you go and hunt your whale, it could be men away for a very long time.
Khoshimov: That's why I brought it up. I was like, the whalers should have the same attitude as Somali.
Evans: Exactly. So, another example would be Amazigh in the mountains, those pastoral nomads, the entire family would move to the summer camp higher up in the hills. But the Kazak women were not veiled. Women were musicians, women were dancers, women would gather in the local assemblies, women might also play diplomatic roles. So in the court of Genghis Khan, for example, for the Mongols, also Turkic people, women were represented in the courts. Women were diplomatic agents, had status and interestingly, there are many burials of women warriors across the Central Asian step. And because on horseback you should be just as fast as a man, you are eliminating that upper body strength advantage. Also using the recursive bow, which was very light, a woman could be fast and nimble. She could have a hound, she could have a horse or an eagle and train it to help her with hunts. So horses could kind of eliminate that biological superiority of men.
Khoshimov: So technology equates?
Evans: Technology creates a lot of variation, but I don't think we can reduce it all to technology. I think that Central Asian Turkic people were just much more gender equal.
Khoshimov: Than Persianates?
Evans: Yeah. Than Arabs. Absolutely.
Khoshimov: Not Arabs, but in Central Asia, Persian speaking people.
Evans: Absolutely. Sorry. Yes. So if we go back to the Ogham inscriptions, it says the Khan and the Khatun decree, the King and Queen decree. So if we look at those epic ballads, they're all praising these women warriors. There is far breed respect and reverence for women. And I just think that is a cultural innovation. I think sometimes we've got to recognize cultural diversity and that can ebb and flow over time. For example, when Ibn Battuta went to now Turkey, Anatolia in the 12th, or was it 14th century? Either 14th or 13th century, he observed these women were not veiling, they drank alcohol. He said, these women are very free. One woman scratched her vagina in front of him, and he was an Arab who was pretty surprised by that. So I just think the Turkic people had very different cultural norms.
Khoshimov: Where exactly in Anatolia he went to?
Evans: I forgot. I forgot.
Khoshimov: Because Anatolia, the difference in type of people, they were Greeks, Armenians…
Evans: These were Turkic peoples. But they assimilated because of their engagement with the Abbasids, and they adopted Islam. So, for example, if you drove to Konya today, I was in last year, you can see all these Seljuk ceramics, where women are shown as musicians. They're not veiled. They're quite prominent in public places. And I think that just culturally changed after the influences of people like Gazali and other Persian theologians who said that female seclusion was part of male piety.
Khoshimov: I see. Okay. So let me introduce one more variable to your construction. Again, very sort of anecdotally, people talk about landscape and terrain. I mean, at least in some findings, they say it matters for things like aggressiveness, for example. And the theory goes, and I'm not sure.
Evans: Oh, this is the Nathan Nunn paper on herding and violence.
Khoshimov: Yes. But there's earlier work, I think by a couple of Soviet anthropologists where they were trying to describe why in Soviet army, people from Caucasus are more aggressive. And their theory was kind of in a similar fashion. It was like in mountainous regions, your crops or your wealth could be taken away in a heartbeat like the Nathan Nunn argument. And because of that, you have to maintain this aura of aggressiveness. You don't want to damage. But then in the same Caucasus, if you go down the mountains, people used to do agriculture in which the fruits of labor cannot be taken away as easily. And that's why just being tough for the sake of it didn't make an evolutionary sense in some way. So, if we take this aggression as a different variable attitude towards women's role, how would that change? Do you think this is correlated?
Evans: So, the Nunn paper and others show that herding is associated with one contemporary conflicts, and also folklore tends to celebrate violence. And their theory is that I don't think it's so much about mountains, but about the insecurity of their assets and the lack of law and order. It is very difficult to build a state. If you have nomads, you can move about because they can't pay taxes. You can't impose any kind of law and order. And if you have no law and order, if you have no legal protection from the police, from the courts, then you need to act tough. In fact, we see this if we look back at the legal records in England, so in the 16th century.
Khoshimov: Like Scottish people.
Evans: Yeah. No, I can talk a lot about Scotland. Scotland is a very interesting case. We should talk about this. So, the highland tribes were violent woman groups, super tough. There were no herds. But they didn't seclude women. How did you then get the Scottish enlightenment? How did you get these norms of civility? Here is my theory. First of all, you have massive violent repression. So the English come in and they totally decimate the highland tribes. They force them to hand over their weapons. They force them to give up their kilts and their tribal allegiance. But there is a quote, you mentioned Afghanistan, Walter Scott said “The highland tribes are just like Afghanistan.” Anyway, so first of all, you have violent repression, stamping them out, and then you get religion. So, you have these very Draconian Kirk sessions, and they are instilling norms. You need to be hardworking. You need to not drink alcohol. You need to be very abstemious. You need to do the right thing. They're trying to build this culture. Then we also see in the emerging centers of Edinburgh, stronger state development. Adam Smith writes about how one court would penalize violence, and two people gained confidence in the court. It is not just that there is say, a $5 or $50 fine for violence, but people expected the courts to create the rule of law. For example, previously if you budged me in the street, let's suppose we're both men, I might challenge you to a dual. Because you had slight in my honor. I'm like, “You want to bring it? Let's bring it, let's fight.” But then I think actually the courts are going to do a better job of all this. There's no need for me to risk my life. So it's confidence in law and order. Another thing is these enlightenment clubs culturally celebrated politeness. So for example, you had a bunch of enlightenment clubs for literature, for science, and they had all these norms. You may only speak when you raise your hand, and this was all celebrated in the newspapers. You had all these upwardly mobile people saying the polite person, the gentrified person raises his hand. That's how they should behave. This is what a modern man of Scotland does. Then on top of that, in places like Venice, you have the emergence of a commercial middle class. And these are people who care about law and order. These are merchants, factory owners who want businesses to thrive. When a bunch of highland louds come in being violent, consuming alcohol, they call in the police because these people are causing a mess for their business. You've got people with a vested economic interest in law and order. I think it's the conflict. That's the sort of big story. It's a bunch of variables. It's got violent repression of the high loan clans, the emergence of economic growth, and also Christianity with rules of propriety accelerated by the Enlightenment Club. So, it's both violence and economics. That would be my Scotland story.
Khoshimov: I see. Okay. And so the difference between say Sicily and Scotland would be the law and order?
Evans: Yes. Absolutely. Sicily had a very high homicide rate until very recently.
Khoshimov: Very recently. Yeah, that's what I was saying.
Evans: And every man had to act tough.
Khoshimov: Exactly. Yeah. If you don't, then you like…
Evans: People would take advantage. In Zambia where I used to live, they said that … (something Zambian),which means to eat a piece of fruit from the person's heads. In Africa women might carry a plate of food on that. It'd be like someone just taking that from you, someone taking advantage of you. If you act soft, then people will just take whatever they can.
Khoshimov: Do you know how Uzbek say a soft acting man?
Evans: What is it?
Khoshimov: It's a guy who cannot take a piece of wood out of a sheep's mouth.
Evans: That's a good one. He is a real softy. Useless man.
Khoshimov: But see, even I think within regionally, if you go to Caucasus and so on, people in the north think that people who are in the cities are softies. And their logic wasn't explicitly that, but they say, “You got to have this aura of aggression, not necessarily use violence, but being able to use.” If you look at the violence numbers, it's a bit misleading thing. It could be that in this Sicily type of place, homicide rates, you said, are high. Sicily is not a great example, but just imagine a society where there's low homicide rates, but it's enforced because everybody has this sort of nuclear bomb. Everybody is a tough man. So you can't really do homicides. And the not tough ones are sort of selected out, and it's really hard to do empirical work in that.
Evans: I think another important thing can be that specific cultures can be celebrated. So you gave the example of the proverb, the same. Also, if you look at Mexico today, crime is thriving, and there is also a set of music that celebrates these violent macho men. There's actually one mayor in Mexico who said they're not allowed to have misogyny in their music, but all those kinds of things can be culturally celebrated. Or a clan, for example, might sing their own praises by talking about their conquest, talking about how victorious they were in battle. So, for example, a father might say to a son who is crying, “Are you a man or a mouse?” So, we're socialized to be tough, men especially.
Khoshimov: In most places, even in places like Russia, which is I would say quite developed in many social aspects, crying is not a manly thing to do, right?
Evans: Absolutely. And that's all part of the cult of war, the cult of masculinity. To be a real Russian man, you've got to be able to fight a beast. You see all those videos of men uploading on YouTube of, “Look, this is me sitting on bear, a black bear or something.” They want to show how tough they are. And that could be accelerated, for example, in the 1990s when you had the rise of urban street crime, and you really needed to signal how tough you're.
Khoshimov: But in the modern world, when you travel, you've been to many places. Where do you observe the most gender dimorphism? It's like the difference between genders in the world. Where is the most that you see?
Evans: In terms of places that I've been, I think one good example would be villages in Baja last year. Their rate of female employment is 5%, and that's in cities in Patna. And if I go to the villages, I was in four villages in Baja, and the women were very shy, and they would cover their faces and they would not speak so much. And I was chatting to many of the women, I said, “Has a woman ever left this village to go for work?” And they said they'd never heard of it. So, in India, it's very common for marriage, but it's men who would go to places like Dharavi and Mumbai to get work. Another example, when I was in Rajasthan, when I went to villages there, the women did not even come out of their homes. It was men who came to greet us. So, I would chat with women in the homes, cross-legged on their beds. I want to go to Pakistan next year. So again, in Pakistan, there are some villages where since the 1960s, women have not voted. In some Pakistani villages, I was reading on the internet. And that is because…
Khoshimov: Isn't like tribal tourism in Northwest?
Evans: I want to come back to your point on northwest Pakistan. Going back to your point about ruggedness, ruggedness can enable cultural isolation. In northern Pakistan, there are three valleys where the Kalash people live. They are not Muslim, they are polytheistic. Women do not veil, they wear brightly colored dresses, and they're far more autonomous and have higher status. So that is one good example of where a conquering force might be very patriarchal, and that is how culture spreads. So it's not determined by geography, it's not determined by anything in that terrain necessarily. But you have this conquering force, and then you have cultural assimilation. The same occurred in the Amazigh mountains in Morocco, cultural isolation. They also had linguistic isolation in the Atlas Mountain.
Khoshimov: They speak very different. They don't speak Arabic.
Evans: They speak Amazigh. Up until the 1990s, 65% of Moroccans were speaking Amazigh. That is linguistic cultural isolation because of Rab terrain.
Khoshimov: Like Berbers in Algeria, right?
Evans: Yeah. So Amazigh is another word for Berbers. Yes. There was a Berber woman in Algeria who led men against the colonial French.
Khoshimov: I was about to say that. Oh, okay.
Evans: You have no point interviewing me. You know the answers already.
Khoshimov: No, but I'm curious about stuff. I'm really curious because whenever I think about gender differences, it seems like I never catch what's going on. It's like whatever theory I have, I can give you 20 counter examples on my own. So, it's really hard to…
Evans: But I think it's because economists like to test the causal effect of one particular variable.
Khoshimov: Exactly. Right.
Evans: Whereas me, as someone who studies 4,000 years of human history, I see that all these things come into play together, and it's like building a rope. There are many threads to it, and they all lace on top of each other.
Khoshimov: Let’s talk about a specific culture. Let's say my recent reading was David Yanagizawa-Drott³. He wrote the paper on gender attitudes of husbands towards female employment in Saudi Arabia. You read the paper?
Evans: And he's got a more recent paper on the same thing, misperceived norms.
Khoshimov: Yeah, I think that's the paper. I'm sorry.
Evans: Yes, yes.
Khoshimov: Basically, the survey was, and fill me if I'm not right, was that when he asked men “What do you think of your wife working?” They were fine with it. But then when the question was like, “What do you think the society would like if your wife would work?”, the men were like “No society wouldn't accept it.” I mean, it is sort of a preference falsification a little bit, right?
Evans: Pluralistic ignorance, right. Absolutely. So this is why I theorize there are several dimensions of gender norms. One is my internalized ideologies, what I personally believe is right and wrong. For example, this can be like, I think it's perfectly fine for women to be leaders. I think women can be great at maths. I think women can do a bunch of stuff, but I may nonetheless be reluctant to pursue that because I anticipate social disapproval. So, it is the anticipation of the social penalty, which could risk a bunch of things. It could be ostracism for my tribe. It could be other people looking down on me. It could harm my…
Khoshimov: Like a decrease of status or whatever.
Evans: Yeah, exactly. And so for example, if you are in a tight kinship community, you really care about that gossip because you don't want to be alienated. If you're in India and you rely other on your jeti to look after during the monsoon, you don't want everyone to think that you're a terrible person with a loose daughter. So these misperceived norms really matter. After the study in Saudi Arabia, they've actually done a global study with Gallup.
Khoshimov: On the same thing? Oh wow.
Evans: Yes, exactly. On the same thing on misperceived norms. They are both about women working outside the home and also affirmative action. What they find in many countries in Latin America, and also India, but not Pakistan, that people underestimate support for women working.
Khoshimov: So let me then ask you the opposite. Are there societies in which people… Let's say, are there in Saudi Arabia, people think society is more conservative than they are. But I don't know, in the US or Scandinavia isn't it opposite?
Evans: Yes. So they ask the question on affirmative action, and they find that Americans overestimate the support for affirmative action. They think people are more progressive than they really are.
Khoshimov: No, but what I really care about is it's the personal attitude versus the societal attitude. Meaning let's say, I don’t know, 5% of American men don't want their wife to be working.
Evans: There's no society as far as I'm aware, where people overestimate wider support for women working. But there are societies where people overestimate support for women in politics.
Khoshimov: I see. Okay. So in the same kind of idea, what'd you think how corrections from institutions like the state can create lasting cultural norms or not? One of the examples I heard in Turkey, after Atatürk, there was this program to bring women from villages into the city universities. It was specifically targeted for women. They had the quotas and so on. So many women were able to go to the best institutions in the country like Boğaziçi or a middle two and so forth. And people say that was one of the reasons why Turkish gender norms are… you don't buy it?
Evans: Turkey has had very low job creation. That is the main issue in Turkey. So even though Atatürk introduced a number of secular laws, and even though Atatürk brought all the madrasas and mosques under state control, the problem was low economic growth. And it doesn't matter if women get educated, if there aren't the jobs there. Then there isn't the income to compensate for the lack of honor. So women stay at home. You have in across the Middle East, especially in the Arabian Gulf, you have gender parity in education. India has also got gender parity in education increasingly, but it's not enough.
Khoshimov: It's the opposite now, right? I was looking in the Middle East numbers. If you look at the STEM fields, there are a lot more women in STEM fields in like Jordan, than in…
Evans: Yeah. Jordan has a high share of women in STEM fields in education?
Khoshimov: No, no, generally. Generally.
Evans: No. In education. In education, Jordan has a very low rate of female labor force participation. I think it's below 20%.
Khoshimov: Yeah, that's what I was saying. I looked at the countries that have high rates of women studying STEM, and it's kind of negatively correlated with female labor force. Norway has very few women studying STEM. Scandinavia is the worst. I mean, four times worse than North Africa. It is ridiculous. So, if you plotted, you would see that the more the women work in a country, the less of them would want to study in a STEM field.
Evans: I don’t know to be honest. I think there are number of possibilities. One for example might be that girls are more likely to pursue STEM if they're in single-sex schools. And many Middle Eastern countries have single-sex schools. So that's one possible explanation. Another possibility is it really depends on the size of the local labor demand. So, there are just some countries where STEM may have more jobs than others. For example, India is the world number one for higher share of female pilots. Even though it has very low female labor force participation, its domestic aviation aid industry is massive. So there's a stronger labor demand. So women can go into that. There are a bunch of variables, and I wouldn't comment on the global trend. What I do is look at each specific country and work out what's going on.
Khoshimov: Oh yeah. So the question number two was what do you think about quotas and programs like affirmative action in modern societies, in achieving goals like gender equality and so forth. So, a lot of governments, especially “the enlightened ones”, or those that claim to be enlightened ones, think about this problem that they perceive low labor force preservation for females and we are going to cure it they think with quotas like, “30% of females should be represented in the parliament, or 20% should be in the government or so forth.” Do you think it is net positive or net negative?
Evans: Okay, let me make the positive case for quotas and then the negative case.
Khoshimov: Alright. Okay. That's right.
Evans: So, on the one hand, people develop their gender ideologies by observing the world around them, both their internalized ideologies and also their expectations of what they think other people support. So if I only ever see men in government, I may revere men as naturally better leaders. Moreover, I may anticipate discrimination. I think no one in my society wants women leaders, so I'm not going to put myself forward. So what you could have therefore is the lack of exposure to women reinforcing a negative feedback loop where other women don't put themselves forward. Moreover, if all those gatekeepers are men, they may remain very sexist. So for example, in Russia today, they're like, the Duma’s almost 90% male. All the gatekeepers, male, massive discrimination, people continue to think of leaders as masculine. So, you might think that if we have quotas, then we are creating exogenous shock. We are increasing exposure to women in positions of prominence. And that might shift people's gender beliefs. Let me give a couple of reasons why we might question that. For example, most Latin American countries have seen a massive increase in affirmative action as a result of feminist mobilization. Brazil has not however, and I'm not precisely sure why it must be some institutional dynamic. I don't think it's religion. I mean, it would be the evangelical stuff. I don't know precisely why, but if you look at value survey data or employment data, all the other gender indicators are the same. So the fact that I think for some party institutional reasons, it doesn't have a quota. It doesn't have many women in positions, but in all the other respects, you don't see a big difference. The second thing I would raise is that the Western international community has since the 1990s, pushed for gender quotas. It says women need to have a seat at the table. And aid dependent authoritarians have often adopted quotas in order to signal the liberal democratic credentials and secure finance from the international financial institutions. And what this’s caused, I would say this is what Matt Anders and Michael Wilco called isomorphic mimicry. In that you are just projecting this signal of being very inclusive. But in fact, on the ground nothing may change. Because if these countries are authoritarian, you have a powerful executive, and the legislature has no power.
Khoshimov: Second, like Russian duma, it doesn't matter if it's 90% matter.
Evans: Yes, exactly. Second issue is in many African countries, you have very weak state capacity, and you have very high informality in the labor market. So, even if you have more women legislators in Cameroon, for example, or in Sal, they're introducing legislation on gender-based violence. The World Bank has a massive program at the moment called “Women, Business and Law”, where they're trying to push for more gender equal laws. What effect does that have? If 80% of people work in the informal economy, what effect does that have if the state capacity is so terrible? Let me give you an example. So I mentioned that 14 years ago, I did research in Zambia. The other day via Instagram, someone alerted me that a woman who I'd spent time with heard her husband had let her. So, she was in a terrible economic situation. She'd lost her house, she'd lost everything. So of course, I wanted to help her economically, but just getting the money to her was an enormous hurdle. What I needed to do is organize for someone else to go to Lusaka by coach, then go back to the village by coach. And that is not just one coach journey. It's like getting to the town, then getting a taxi. I had to orchestrate this enormous train, just to transfer money. So, we're stake over Yale, Mushfiq Mobarak was working on the Covid response, just getting drugs to African villages where you have low population density, low state capacity, or give the example of India. India has many, many laws against dowry, against gender-based violence, on female inheritance. But women rarely claim those rights. So if women are still dependent on patriarchal guardians, if you still have very low female labor force participation, all those fantastic gender equal laws on paper just don't get claimed. So women don't report to the police because the police is overburdened. There are lots of murderers awaiting trial. Lots of rapists awaiting trial because the criminal justice system is overburdened. So, legislators are never going to be very powerful in a place that either has a strong executive, high informality or weak state capacity.
Khoshimov: And bad economics.
Evans: Yeah. Exactly. Which recreates is this low female labor force participation. So for example, I was talking to a colleague here at the University of Toronto, Carolina Arteaga. She's doing work on domestic violence courts in Puerto Rico⁴, special courts just for domestic violence. But if people don't trust your criminal justice system, it makes no difference. As long as people don't trust your criminal justice system, Mexico may have a female president. Right after the upcoming elections, I was in Mexico and I was attacked. A guy attacked me, whatever. I was punched in the face. Yes, we can jump over it. I called the police. What did they do? Police did nothing.
Khoshimov: Yeah. I mean, this is really sad, but a lot of times when I talk about this issue in Uzbekistan, for example, women who get harassed or something bad happened, they are afraid to report it to anybody, any living soul, including the state. Or school authorities, if it happens in the university or school and so on. And so it's kind of like the existence of the law doesn't mean it is going to be…
Evans: There are lots of laws that are never claimed or enforced. And if you have stigma, if you have shame, if the vast majority of women are dependent on patriarchal guardians, if you still have a culture of honor and chastity, then a woman would be blamed. Across Eastern Europe, across Russia the Eurostat survey suggests that if a woman who is raped, what was she doing? What was she wearing? All those things which are victim-blaming.
Khoshimov: Yeah. I was reading, I think you're familiar with it. In Egypt, they did the survey asking privately, women, were you ever sexual harassed?⁵ Almost like a hundred percent said yes. And then almost everybody said they never reported to their male relatives. I'm not talking about state authorities, not even their closest skin. And that perpetuates the crimes. So the criminals are aware…
Evans: Of this impunity. The perpetrators anticipate impunity. The perpetrators know.
Khoshimov: They know that nobody's going to report it. And so they can continue doing it.
Evans: Absolutely. And so for example, I interviewed women who told me about when riding the bus as school girls, they're very high risk of being molested. But some of them may not even want to tell their parents because then their parents might restrict their mobility further. So there are bunch of reasons. Either you might be blamed or you worry that you're going to be restricted even more.
Khoshimov: Like what were you wearing?
Evans: Yes. Exactly. So it's very difficult. I mean, in some societies you do have feminists organizing against it. In South Korea, there was massive organization and they pushed for the click sound on cameras because men were doing upscale photography. And so now there was that click sound. It's legally mandated, but still. Whereas institutions matter too, because China is very authoritarian, and it gives men total impunity for not just sexual harassment, but it's also gender-based violence. So, there's this wonderful new book by Tiantian Zhen⁶, which is all about police turning a blind eye to legally a man can beat his wife to a pulp, as long as it's not too often. And even if a wife complains the police, they'll do nothing. They'll say “Go away”.
Khoshimov: So in some way, this authoritarianism makes women's life especially horrid. Right?
Evans: Well, I would say that authoritarianism prevents civil society in general and prevents feminist mobilization. And feminist mobilization is a major mechanism of cultural change. Of course, not every woman goes on a protest or a march, but you hear these ideas in magazines or newspapers.
Khoshimov: But why? What I understand is I was thinking about the political science of that, and in some way, isn't it like the blessing for authoritarian leaders if they have feminist movements? Because if they do have it, it kind of distracts them from other things. Not sure, it is very commonly known in the West, but first protest in the Soviet Union were ecological. People were protesting against ecology because they couldn't protest against the party. And so I mean, the theory of maybe it could be the ecology protest actually collapsed the union, I don't know. But the point is the women's rights is such an adjacent issue for many. I have no explanation why in China, it is the case. Or in Russia, it is the case because it doesn't seem to me the authoritarian leaders have any incentives to do that.
Evans: They want to… So in China and in Russia, civil society in general is repressed. So you don't have a culture of resistance. You don't have people believing that “I can take to the streets, I can have a demonstration, or maybe we could change the law.” People will be much more despondent and that feeds into everything.
Khoshimov: But what about the property crime? Let's say if somebody steals something in China, police will be honest.
Evans: Yeah, of course. They want to maintain law and order.
Khoshimov: So why don't they want to maintain law and order when it comes to women's rights?
Evans: Because the gender issue has not been politicized. People need to think of, women need to identify collectively.
Khoshimov: So, the law and order is sort of a demand from society in the social contract. It's like, we're not going to vote, but you give us law and order. But in that low and order package, there is no piece of it that says women have to be able to walk in the streets without being harassed and so on. Okay, I see. There is no sort of societal…
Evans: So people are not necessarily feminists. Even if women work at high rates, they may not necessarily prioritize their gender interests. And we see this in many African countries too. For example, I was recently chatting to a woman from Cameroon, and I also have friends in Nigeria. Their primary form of identity, loyalty and allegiance is to their ethnic group. Like someone is Igbo for example, they do not identify with a woman just because she is another woman. So a Hausa woman is totally different. She is a woman from the Muslim north. She's totally different from an Igbo woman. Igbo woman will not necessarily take kindly to a campaign for gender quotas. Why would you want a Hausa woman? What is that? It's a totally different culture. So there's no natural affinity or sorority between women just because they are women. It's taken over a hundred years of feminist campaigning to point to some of the structural oppression of women iteratively mobilize against that in cultures where there is already a culture of resistance. So Latin America over the 1970s, over the 1980s, had massive demonstrations against dictatorships over the 1990s. There were gas wars, there were water wars, there were the campaign of the unemployed in Argentina. All this builds a culture that people can change the system, change the culture through mobilization. That builds a sense of, going back to the point about pluralistic ignorance, collective efficacy that we can change it. It builds an idea of can-do attitude. Rights and entitlement, but through mobilization specifically. And then that can be accelerated by regional meetings, social media, sharing memes, et cetera. But in a culture like Turkey, for example, I was in Istanbul last year, and my Iranian friends wanted to go to a protest against the Islamic Republic. This is about the time of Mahsa Amini. For women life freedom. So they were going to go for the “Women. Life. Freedom” protest, and they said, “Alice, come”. So of course I went and she's like, Alice, you're wearing good shoes. I was like, yes. She says, “Alice, if I say run, you run”.I told some of my Turkish friends, I was going to the protest. And they were like, that is not a good idea. Do not go to the protest. And in fact, in Ankara, people were beaten up at that protest. So, they weren't thinking as feminist, they weren't thinking about gender. These guys weren't favor in favor of the Islamic Republic. But if you are in a culture whereby you've seen authoritarian repression, which is happening now in Turkey, then you just don't think, don't go to protests, don't do it. It's not worth it, better just to stay home and adopt your own individual coping strategies. But whereas in Latin America, a lot of women, it's probably only 2% or something. But that sends a big signal in it. And women share all these tiktoks, et cetera. And they have the same anthem, the same chant.
Khoshimov: Many authoritarian places. I'm sure it happened in China and North Korea and Soviet Union. They basically forced women to work. So how this effect changed their attitudes?
Evans: So in some places, there was forced labor. So for example, in parts of…
Khoshimov: By force, I don't mean necessarily…
Evans: Yeah, okay. But I want to talk about the economics about in some places, there was forced collectivization, sedentary farming in parts of Tajikistan, for example. But for the most part, it operated slightly differently, I think through economics. So central planners set productivity targets high. So firms had to reach their productivity targets. They also set wages very low, right? So a male breadwinner could not single handedly provide for his family. You needed two earners. Moreover, the workbook was like your passport to a bunch of other things, like maybe a holiday, maybe an apartment, whatever. So as a result of this, you had very high female labor force supervision added to that.
Khoshimov: Like in Uzbekistan, it was really high.
Evans: Added to that would of course be in Russia, whereby 40 million men died after the second World War. So you had a massive labor shortage. So, the Soviet firms always had a labor shortage because they wanted to meet their productivity targets, and it was not easy. And so as a result of that, the vast majority of women would work full-time in Russia and in China and in Central Asia. But they still tended to be very misogynist, sexist, but women…
Khoshimov: So I don't understand why this happening though. If women work, why the misogynistic sort of thing?
Evans: Why does misogynist persist? Because it's not unusual for women to work. Women have worked all over the world throughout history. But the question is, is that work valued? Is that work respected? So even going back to our discussions on being domestic in many parts of the world, domestic labor just isn't valued, even though men and women are interdependent, even though a woman is playing a crucial role, looking after the children, making sure everyone is safe, making sure the food isn't poisoned, walking 10 kilometers to get that fire, she is working. The question is not the labor, but the question is, is that valued? Is that respected? And the women come to privilege, their freedoms, their autonomy over a bunch of other things. Whereas for example, let's go back to Tashkent today, and this is where you may correct me. But for example, if there is a strong, if you really privilege the patrilocal family, right? Then you want to get a daughter-in-law who is going to be well-behaved, good natured, obedient, serve her in-laws, right? And then you may try to exercise control over her so that she maintains the honor of the family.
Khoshimov: I won't quite use the word honor, but…
Evans: Okay. What word would you use?
Khoshimov: I don't know. Respect?
Evans: Respectability, right? Respectability, right, sorry. So you want to find a woman who people will not gossip about her. People will not spread rumors that she's up to no good. So there are strong incentives to make sure that she's serving that family. And also there is strong pressures to have a son. Sons are celebrated. And so all those mean, and you might still have a sort of reverence for men as better leaders, et cetera. And so if the young woman can marry into a better family by signaling those norms of being well-behaved, then there is a strong incentive for young women to do precisely that. And so I was looking at some data today that shows in Uzbekistan over the past 10 years, more girls are being married under 18. And that could be because they're signaling this girl is not exposed to the wider world. She's still relatively young, she's malleable. She's going to be a good daughter because she's going to fit in and you can mold her as you like. So even if you expect her to go to work, maybe you expect her to sell at the market in Tashkent, whatever, or something like that. Even she still comes back to that patrilocal family. And once you've had a couple of children, it's very difficult to rock the boat.
Khoshimov: I mean, there are social costs for divorce.
Evans: Yes. Huge social costs, right? Of course. So even if you are working, no matter that work.
Khoshimov: The work is really kind of weird. I have my own theory, and I'll tell you how I anecdotally collected that data. If it is, there's basically two sides of the spectrum. So women who work are really women who don't have to work for money. So they do it for leisure, like a leisure class, literally. So, there are government institutions that pay very little. A lot of people who work there could be women. And then there’s another side of the spectrum where women work because they may not have breadwinners. Or the household function, the production function doesn't give enough. So the men work a place where it's not sufficient to support the family. And so it's very two different spectrums. It's a super-rich woman who drives cars and then come to work to do work for the social purposes, especially it's teaching at the universities or stuff like that, where everybody is aware that women who work there do it for social reasons, not for economic reasons. And so what happens is there's a huge in-between, between 20th to 90th percentile where women can say, “I'm not that poor to work, or I'm not that rich to work”.
Evans: So, wait, let me explain it in a different way. If we go back to this honor income trade-off, but let's call it for Tashkent, the respect income trade-off.
Khoshimov: Let's put it this way, because honor has this connotation of promiscuity, but it's not the question.
Evans: Respect income trade-off. So the poorest women have to work from bare bone survival. So they sacrifice respect. They're like, “Even if people are going to gossip about me being in that market, I have no choice. I have to do it”. But what we see is in societies where family respect is contingent on a well-behaved woman, when the family gets a little bit wealthier, the woman withdraws from the labor market. So they're basically buying their respectability. So in India too, in a rural area, as villagers get a bit richer, women stop working. Like a Dalit woman will stop working for the upper class because why forfeit all that social respectability. But then you have at the very higher the upper echelon, you might have tertiary educated women who want to pursue their own fulfillment. But I don't think it's just leisure. I don't think it's just leisure. It's also respectability. Government institutions at higher educational institutions, you're mixing with a slightly different kind of people. You expect greater respect. There's more surveillance, there's more norms of propriety. So, no one is going to gossip or think badly about a woman who works at university or a government job. There is no risk of impropriety. There is no risk to the family's respectability. So, it's always this “income respect trade-off”. Let me give another example from Gaurav Chiplunkar and Pinelopi Goldberg. They find that in India, a woman will work for a lower wage if it's for a female owned firm. Because they're safeguarding her respectability.
Khoshimov: The same thing in Uzbekistan for sure. So, there are types of jobs that women don't go because of the alleged inferences about that type of job that society may have.
Evans: What do you think that would be?
Khoshimov: So, the job that requires mingling with men more.
Evans: Yeah. Exactly. That would be exactly mingling with men, because that is damaging family respectability.
Khoshimov: So the part of is interesting though, even the high-status jobs, like the government work is high-status, low-pay or university, but they also mingle with men, but that doesn't have that many.
Evans: But they have a different norm of propriety and respectability. So, a guy who's been to university has been socialized in a certain kind of way, not to women.
Khoshimov: I see. Yeah. So being forced to do jobs that forces women to hang around men, let's say, is obviously the least favorite.
Evans: The balanced survival. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. And I think also what really matters is socialization. So there's this wonderful book “Chup”⁷, which is about India. Choop. It means “Be quiet”.
Khoshimov: C H O O P?
Evans: C H U P. And it's all about Indian girls being socialized to submit, being socialized, to put others first, to think about how to care for others to think about how to take care of their grievances. So I remember I was in Rajasthan and I was interviewing this woman, and I was asking her questions, “What would you prefer? What would you rather like in her community?” Women were not allowed to go to weddings. And I was like, “Would you like to go to weddings?” And she just says, it's tradition. She didn't even have the frame of thinking of to say what she preferred. She just wasn't in that culture of picking and choosing and saying what she wanted. She just says, “Well, that's tradition”. The idea of her having a subjective evaluation and saying what she wanted was not part of the way that she thought about the world. I think if people are socialized to put others first, women socialize too. For example, in much of North India, men eat first, and that's totally unquestioned. In much of southern India, you can have rates of 35% of people saying that a man is justified in beating his wife. Very high justification of men beating their wives. And that is because people just adopt the norms of the environment. So you grew up in a place where violence is widespread, where men have the authority to act in these ways. Then it's not necessarily questioned. No person invents their own feminist treaties. I myself did not develop all the ideas that are in my head. I read hundreds and hundreds of books to get to this state. And if you are in an environment that's much more homogenous and patriarchal, you just don't question it no matter if you work or not, if you are just associating with other people who also have this patriarchal mindset. In Russia, Russian women work at very high rates. 44% of Russian economists are women. 40-44% of Russian business managers are women. But still, they see feminist as toxic, man-hating, aggressive, lesbians. That goes partly back to the question of authoritarian repression. If you're so repressive, then only the super most radical people emerge. So, it is not a woman that you would identify with, but also you just don't have that culture, that visibility. And also they've been taught as western.
Khoshimov: Oh, I think Russia is a lot more liberal than its current government. And I think once this generation dies out, which is now the Putin and his subordinates, sort of the average Russian is a lot more, I would say, liberal in a small war than they want them to be perceived or the current elite wants them to be perceived. So then the grand theory would be if a country, like say Uzbekistan is facing problems with gender disparities. I mean I'm very biased that if our economy starts growing, then women's rights, a lot of problems going to solve themselves. In this margin, I was thinking, and you I hope will tell me why this is wrong.
Evans: I think for example, it is certainly true that job creating growth is a major engine of gender equality.
Khoshimov: So increasing wages, increasing risk for jobs.
Evans: Yes. Because let's say employees prefer men. But if business is so profitable it makes sense to hire more workers, then they're going to run out of men and they hire women. So, women come to the front door.
Khoshimov: There's like a bigger fee to pay for bias. If you're like a woman-hating person, you lose business.
Evans: I'll take it. Okay. But I guess the question is that even as countries develop economically, you can still see different cultural influences. So perhaps we should talk about the religion in Uzbekistan. So the government used to be incredibly repressive.
Khoshimov: Women couldn't wear a veil and enter a government building, for example.
Evans: Or I think in Tajikistan, I read that in 2015, an official forced 15,000 men to shave their beards.
Khoshimov: In Uzbekistan, they used to do it occasionally. I'm not sure the numbers in, but…
Evans: In Tajikistan, yes. So there are a bunch of very, very repressive practices. That's right. And that pushes piety into the private sphere. So people may still be practicing their religion but not doing it publicly.
Khoshimov: So the woman being part of private sphere?
Evans: Wait. But as governments liberalize in terms of permitting freedom of expression, then you may see more religion coming into the fore. And as long as people remain economically insecure, they may use that religion to back up the primacy of kinship. So I was going back to people wanting a well-behaved woman. I've interviewed women from Uzbekistan who tell me that maybe the clerics will say, “A woman will only go to heaven if she pleases her husband. A woman will only go to heaven if she obeys her husband. If a woman obeys her husband, then it is not her sin. No matter what she does, it's not her sin.”Now that means it's not even in the Quran, but you have all these ideas that might be accepted because they reinforce the existing kinship system and obedience serving to kin. So I certainly think that even as countries become wealthy, you can still see religion being used in a way to legitimize patriarchy.
Khoshimov: What I was thinking is it is because of economic underdevelopment, right?
Evans: Yes.
Khoshimov: So my theory would go like this. I think you asked on Twitter a couple of years ago or a month ago, I lost track of time, that you said like, “Oh, I wonder what's happening in Central Asian countries about labor force participation”. But my long answer was that because of lack of economic growth, this is the consequence of those.
Evans: Yeah. So I would say, so economic growth affects maybe three domains. One is if you have low economic growth, then you have low demand for female labor. On top of that, kinship remains very, very important. Because you're so economically insecure. So, you desperately need other people to support you for mutual insurance. You cannot risk being. So if you're concerned about ostracism, you need everyone else's approval. You need your wife to be doing something respectable. On top of that, there is a lot of literature that shows that if you have some negative shock, whether it's a health shock, whether it is an economic shock, you may turn to religion. So you may pray more, you may want the community of the mosque, et cetera. You may need pray for a miracle. As long as you have each economic precarity… I think it was Uzbekistan's, GDP per capita is like one and a half thousand dollars.
Khoshimov: Yeah, a bit more. But yeah, it's like 2000.
Evans: Okay, I apologize.
Khoshimov: Okay.
Evans: Exactly. So, as long as you have this economic precarity, you have low demand for female labor, women's stake.
Khoshimov: Very high demand for being accepted in society.
Evans: Yes, exactly. Than that interacts with religiosity. Once some people turn religious, once you have a critical mass of religious people, then you need their approval. So you too start veiling it.
Khoshimov: Then what happened was that there's this oppression of religion that happened is a catalysis for this, right?
Evans: I don’t know. I don’t know whether it's a repression that caused it per se.
Khoshimov: So let me tell you the story then anecdotal. So I worked in, they called the Academy of Public Administration. It was based in 2015 before grad school in the US. So I came into the room and then there's a woman who works for a state, she's like a young woman who works for the state. And she was presenting us something really bizarre. It was about how to catch a veiled woman if she's veiled in a bazaar. And what she was claiming was that in the western Uzbekistan a lot of people don't wear headscarves in a specific fashion, but if a woman is walking in a bazaar in a long-sleeved cloth or a long skirt, it's likely that she's religious. And so police better watch out. She might not be wearing a hijab in a traditional sense, but she could be doing it in Uzbek fashion. But because it's a long sleeve, it's a telltale sign that she is, she could be more religious than you think. So you have to go and take note. So she was talking about what she did in the region in that academy. I walked down the corridor into my workspace and a colleague of mine was crying and I asked her what happened? And she's like, some of the students complained to state security that her clothing was too promiscuous, and they weren't able to focus. And so that day I found out that basic question was that how long the skirt should be from the knee. She got repressed basically because her skirt was at the knee and that woman was arrested in the bazaar because it was too long. It was near the heel. And it was like this 30 centimeters of women's flesh. And if you go too much up or down, then they're going to cause problem. They can fire you from there, or the police can go in and not let you in metro. And I was like, “This is bizarre.”
Evans: I think that's an example of a range of things in totalitarian systems, which there are a range of weird things that happen in totalitarian systems.
Khoshimov: But what I think what this has caused is that the women who are discriminated against their religion now feel like if you don't do this, it's a bad sign because now you can do it, like in Turkey.
Evans: Yeah. I mean, I just think there are a bunch of motivations for religiously going back to the economic shocks. I really like the work of Michele Gelfand and others⁸ all about how when there's some kind of existential threat, the shock, you want your group to be strong, you seek a communal identity, you clinging to the group, and religion is one way of bringing the group together. So just yesterday I went to Friday prayers with my Somali friend, and that's a group activity and praying or anything together. These synchronous ritual activities can promote a psychological effect of group bonding.
Khoshimov: I see. But it's really hard to make conclusion out of it right now. So basically in the first scratch would be economic growth improve women's lives?
Evans: Okay. I think that's too vague. I would say job creating economic growth tends to raise female labor force participation. But then you need the feminist activism and the feminist activism can only take place in democratic cultures where there is a culture of resistance. So, China has got much strong economically, but yes, but there is still…
Khoshimov: But compared China now to pre…
Evans: To a hundred years ago, enormous difference.
Khoshimov: No, not to a hundred years ago. Let's say to China 80s. In the 80s, was it worse for women or better?
Evans: Okay. So I think one factor is you've seen massive urbanization. And in cities, women can mix and mingle, share ideas. In rural areas, if you're just working on a family farm, then your exit options are terrible. You don't know alternatives. You're still in that patriarchal system.
Khoshimov: But for vast majority of Chinese women…
Evans: Yes. So moving to cities being more liberal, yes, that's an improvement. But you still have a very, even to Chinese government, million Chinese government data says that 35% of Chinese women have been beaten by their husbands. And that's government data.
Khoshimov: Oh wow. Okay, I see.
Evans: So I think it's important to recognize that things gender equality may improve in some domains, but not others. So for example, you may see more women in the upper echelon of management. There are a lot of Chinese billionaire, female billionaires, but still locked out of politics, still impunity for male violence. And how that relates to welfare is a further question. So I think we see movements in lots of different domains.
Khoshimov: So economic growth can only help so far, basically.
Evans: And I would say specifically it's about job creating economic growth because resource wealth won't necessarily have the same effect.
Khoshimov: Oh yeah, job creating. I mean Uzbekistan doesn't have oil or anything that…
Evans: But Kazakhstan obviously has spillovers from its oil.
Khoshimov: Kazakhstan has, Kazakhstan has.
Evans: And Kazakhstan, I think it shows up in the Kazakhstan and in more economically prosperous areas of Kazakhstan, people tend to be more liberal. But I think that also comes back to culture. Like we were talking about the Kazak nomads. So I think Kazakhstan benefits from one a more gender equal Turkic culture.
Khoshimov: No, but Turkmenistan is also a counterfactual in this.
Evans: Yes.
Khoshimov: Turkmenistan is a lot worse for women.
Evans: And it's very, very poor.
Khoshimov: No, Turkmenistan is not.
Evans: What's the GDP per capita?
Khoshimov: So the problem is with the reporting, but I think it's not poorer than say Tajikistan. And then it's very, the resources are constrained around one family basically. But the situation with women's rights is horrible. They can't see it in the front seat of the car.
Evans: I didn't know that.
Khoshimov: Oh yeah. This is ridiculous. They have specific set of haircuts they can get and they can't get lashes or it's absolutely bizarre if you just read their laws. There is no place in former Soviet Republics has it, but it's not particularly religious. It comes from the government.
Evans: It's from the government who said women can't sit in the front seat?
Khoshimov: Yeah, if they're not married or something.
Evans: I didn't know that.
Khoshimov: It is a quite repressive place for women. And I would recommend you interview Turkmen woman in Turkey.
Evans: Yes, I would like to.
Khoshimov: The stories are like manicure would be a reason for getting fired from a job or something.
Evans: Wow. Yes, it was very good in Turkey and in Poland I was able to interview a lot of migrants. And that is why I liked Toronto as well. I can meet lots of migrants. My mother likes it too. She was like, Betty, you stay in Toronto and interview people from Toronto.
Khoshimov: Oh, your mother lives here?
Evans: No, but she's just happy that I'm in Toronto rather than going to Pakistan. But I will go to Pakistan.
Khoshimov: Yeah, I think you need sort of some sort of boots on the ground to actually see stuff. Because reading is, I mean…
Evans: It makes a massive difference. So my mother will just have to endure.
Khoshimov: Okay. I think the time allocated to me, I've spent most of it. So thank you so much for your time and willingness. Thanks for cooperation and conversation.
Evans: Yes.
Khoshimov: No, I mean I didn't cover even a third of it. There's one special question from one student. She asks why? So she's at the university and she faces a lot more sort of, not discrimination, but let me see how she formulated it. God, I cannot find it. Anyways, it's too long of a list. So she says her peers, female peers are not happy with her ambitions, let's say. And so she feels that more females repress ambitions of their female peers rather than the males in the university.
Evans: So her female peers criticize her for being too ambitious?
Khoshimov: More so than her male peers.
Evans: But I don't think we should be surprised by this. So when we talk about a culture, so earlier you used the term gender disparities, and I think that's the wrong term. I wouldn't use this. I use the term patriarchy because patriarchy is a culture. It's about men being seen as better leaders, men being seen as more knowledgeable authorities, men being deserving of deference. The idea is that women should serve men and male activities, whether that's fighting or earning money. Being culturally revered, while women are just these stupid idiots, whatever. So it is really about our mentalities. And within those cultures, it's perfectly normal and expected that anyone who's hearing those discourses, observing men in positions of leadership would adopt those ideologies. So it's not like we should expect women to be, especially gender equal. In fact, women can be incredibly…
Khoshimov: Can they be more repressive or not?
Evans: Yes, of course. So the mother-in-law, right? I'm sure you've heard many stories in Tashkent of a very abusive, controlling mother-in-law.
Khoshimov: For sure.
Evans: So a woman in Tashkent, her economic survival and future depends on her son as a breadwinner, right?
Khoshimov: Like a southern Italy.
Evans: Yes. But I think more so than that, because I mean very strong parallel. So the worst thing for a woman in southern Italy or indeed Tashkent, is if the bride and groom go and live separately, because then maybe he will be spending more on wife. He will be giving more kindness and generosity. She has lost her breadwinner. She's lost the golden boy. So by controlling the wife, by keeping them all loyal to her. So there's this work by Alison Evans in Uta Pradesh also in audition, they find that married women have very few friends because they're so restricted by their mother-in-law. And you can also see…
Khoshimov: But why in an unmarried place where the university?
Evans: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you can have lots of jealousy. So one, you can also have jealousy between women feeling uncomfortable. So there's a very nice paper, I don’t know if you saw it, on zero sum mentalities.
Khoshimov: Yeah. Reason. It is an amazing paper, actually.
Evans: Yeah, very nice. So where there is economic stagnation or massive discrimination where it's very hard to get ahead economically, and when you have not experienced, if you get any ahead relative to your parents, then you may be very jealous of other people who do get ahead because you have this mentality. If they're getting hurt, it's worse for me. One is the pie is smaller and you feel uncomfortable. And so when I lived in a Zambian slum for six months, I really saw this that people were not happy with their neighbors doing well. It really incited bitterness and disgust and hatred. Why is that person doing too well, you can also see at the among academics today, they may be very jealous of someone else doing so well.
Khoshimov: I mean, I saw it a lot in people who work for security apparatus because there are so many generalists they can give. So any promotion is on their dime. But there's one more question. That one study, sorry, I had to ask you this. There's a study at the University of Chicago's School of Business in Booth and I think you are familiar with it. So, they interviewed women about their ambitions and careers one-on-one, and then they ask women about their ambitions in front of the MBA class. You probably have…
Evans: No, I haven't seen this.
Khoshimov: Oh, this an amazing paper. What they find that women who are not engaged or not married or not dating tend to understate their ambition in front of the auditorium. But in one-on-one, they'll sell the truth. I mean, at least that's how the researchers are packaging it.
Evans: So they're selling themselves as not too ambitious?
Khoshimov: But not women who are engaged, married or having a long-time boyfriend. And that's happening at the university. It's an MBA program at the of Chicago, one of the best business schools in the world. And I was like, “Wow, that's weird.” But I don't know what's an explanation? What do you think?
Evans: I'll just mention this one study in India, a woman who mentions her job is less likely to get replies to a matrimonial advert. But whether that also holds in the US, I mean maybe women. But maybe yes, in the US perhaps women imagine that if they signal too much ambition, then men will think that they're not so permitted to the union. I don’t know.
Khoshimov: The question that was lingering in my mind is just the real preference of you pursuing grad degree at the Booth School of Business. Super selection of people who are very ambitious from the get-go. And so it's like splitting hair basically at that level where obviously you have worked in a very demanding job before getting into the MBA program. And obviously if you are spending so much time, energy and money on this, you want some sort of payback. And everybody understands that, but even them…
Evans: And that is why we need to use the term patriarchy, not gender disparity. That is patriarchy. That is women lowering themselves for a public presentation.
Khoshimov: The economist question here is we observe something, and we say, is it optimal? So it's optimal if it's true for assortative mating, what if men don't care about it?
Evans: Yes, right. Then it's pluralistic ignorance.
Khoshimov: Right, exactly. So that's the thing. I don't know.
Evans: I mean, but even I wouldn't use the term optimal, even if men do care. Because that's malleable, right?
Khoshimov: No, yeah, for sure. But what I mean is even at that cross section, was it like if you're a friend with that woman, would you say, “Hey, by the way, just tone down your ambition if you want to get married or something”? Would you or not? What's the policy angle here? You see, and that's why I'm like, the fact that this happens in Uzbekistan, for example, is not surprising given it happens in the US.
Evans: This goes back to your question on quotas. In the US case, it may be important and effective to have gender quotas because that might normalize people to ambitious women. If you had more gender quotas in management, then people would become more accepting. Your female managers realize they're widely accepted. So in those particular examples that could overcome if it is pluralistic.
Khoshimov: All right, this was Alice Evans. Thank you.
Evans: No, thank you very much. Great questions. Thank you.
Mentioned literature:
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2 - Anke Becker, On the Economic Origins of Restrictions on Women's Sexuality, CESifo Working Paper Series, August 2019.
3 - David Yanagizawa-Drott, Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González, Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia, American Economic Review, Volume 110, No10, October 2020, Pages - 2997-3029.
4 - Carolina Arteaga, Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment, University of Toronto, August 2021.
5 - Hossam El Hamalawy, Al Azhar Encourages Victims of Assault to Speak Up, Report, Egyptian Streets, July 2020.
6 - Tiantian Zheng, Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China, Bloomsbury Academic, July 2022.
7 - Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India's Women, Juggernaut Publication, February 2019.
8 - Michele Gelfand, Cultural Evolutionary Mismatches in Response to Collective Threat, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 30 Issue 5, October 2021.